{"id":3791,"date":"2009-06-18T20:46:16","date_gmt":"2009-06-19T03:46:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/2009\/06\/18\/the-language-instinct\/"},"modified":"2026-01-21T16:34:43","modified_gmt":"2026-01-22T00:34:43","slug":"the-language-instinct","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/2009\/06\/18\/the-language-instinct\/","title":{"rendered":"The Language Instinct"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>She spins in circles and says, &#8220;I&#8217;m getting busy!!&#8221; and laughs when she falls down.<\/p>\n<p>She adds plural ending to words that are already plural: gloveses, shoeses, kidses.<\/p>\n<p>She adds &#8220;ed&#8221; to verbs in current tense to make them past-tense: &#8220;It breaked,&#8221; &#8220;I eated.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>She sits in her wading pool, looks up at the trees blowing in the wind and says, &#8220;The trees are dancing.&#8221; She sees a butterfly and says, &#8220;It&#8217;s so beautiful.&#8221; She puts on her crown and says, &#8220;I&#8217;m very cute!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Some day I will get around to reading Steven Pinker&#8217;s book, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Language-Instinct-Creates-Perennial-Classics\/dp\/0060958332\">The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language<\/a>, but right now I&#8217;m observing it in action. It&#8217;s wonderful!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>She spins in circles and says, &#8220;I&#8217;m getting busy!!&#8221; and laughs when she falls down. She adds plural ending to words that are already plural: gloveses, shoeses, kidses. She adds &#8220;ed&#8221; to verbs in current tense to make them past-tense: &#8220;It breaked,&#8221; &#8220;I eated.&#8221; She sits in her wading pool, looks up at the trees [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,34,16,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-motherhood","category-nature","category-social-science"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3791","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3791"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3791\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4752,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3791\/revisions\/4752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}